Paper Fan in Cinema 4D

Paper Fan in Cinema 4D – a quick easy setup for creating an easily customizable paper fan in Cinema 4D.

This was requested by Than Htun (one of our awesome Members) who needed a paper fan for a project he was working on.

While the fan isn’t perfectly phisically accurrate, it’s quick and easy to setup, renders fast and should get you by in a pinch.

NOTE: This post was originally a project file only but members voted for a tutorial.

Here’s how to set it up:

1. Make a zig-zag spline (or use a formula like we do in the project file) each zag will represent a fold
2. Wrap the shape to a Circle using the Spline Wrap Deformer.
3. Put that in a Lathe object to give it thickness, you can use Scaling in the Lathe to change the height of the fan.
4. You can animate the From and Two settings of the Spline Wrap to make the fan open.
5. You can add a slight spring to the animation with a Delay Effector.
6. To make the handle I just made a copy of the paper setup, made it full height, and put it inside an Atom Array to turn the edges into geometry.
7. If you bake as Alembic and then bake the objects from the timeline you can easily UV map everything.
8. I used Leonardo AI to create the image for the fan and Substance Painter to add some extra details.